The very first issue of the magazine I edited featured on its cover Aamir Khan and Sridevi posing together for the first and only time. All youthful enthusiasm about being appointed the editor of Movie magazine in October 1988, I desired to bring in a new look with a splash.
In those days, it was practically unheard of to arrange a magazine photo shoot with two stars who were not doing a film together. But I wanted to do something startlingly different for my first cover.
Sridevi was the reigning queen of Hindi films and young Aamir was the flavour of the season post Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak so I decided on a joint cover with them.
I wisely approached Aamir first and got his consent because the first question Sridevi asked me was: ‘Has Aamir agreed?’
At the photo session, Aamir was elated though a tad nervous. After all, he had just scored his first success while Sridevi had been a leading star for a decade.
Also, Sridevi, for some reason, was sporting high heels.
When I whispered to my photographer friend Rakesh Shreshtha that she was looking taller than him, Sridevi overheard and flung aside her heeled shoes.
Did Aamir and Sridevi chat with each other?
Only formal hellos.
But their photos crackled.
I was ecstatic when I saw the results of the photoshoot.
However, I ran up against an unexpected hurdle.
My publishers had appointed a hotshot designer duo from the advertising world to design the magazine. And they took one look at the negatives in the dark room (this was pre-digitisation) and airily declared: ‘We have decided to go with a Sridevi solo picture on the cover.’
While a Sridevi cover would have looked undeniably attractive, it would have hardly been ground-breaking.
I politely underlined that it was my call to make, and saved a much-talked-about cover from the jaws of anonymity.
Analysing the hot reception to the cover, Rakesh Shreshta said, “The boy next door standing with the diva was like the ultimate fantasy of the common man coming true.”
Aamir and Sridevi sure did look good together, but sadly while Sri paired up with Salman (Chaand Ka Tukda) and Shah Rukh (Army), somehow, no producer found the right project that would justify casting these two selective stars with each other.
Anyway, the issue with Aamir and Sridevi on the cover sold out at the stands in days and we had to rush in a reprint.
As the editor of Movie magazine, creating a stand out cover was a monthly challenge and I rubbed shoulders with the best shutterbugs in showbiz.
The soft-spoken soft-focus specialist Gautam Rajadhyaksha shot the joint Rajesh Khanna-Amitabh Bachchan cover, the jocular Jagdish Mali shot the Pooja Bhatt body-painted cover, and Mr Rush Rakesh Shrestha shot Aamir-Sridevi besides Shah Rukh (at the peak of his dark Darr-Baazigar days) being overrun by a bunch of toddlers.
I would like to believe that the foundation for this awareness about visual quality was laid by my stint as a photojournalist.
A few years earlier, I had armed myself with a Nikon camera and ventured into photo-journalism to supplement my modest salary and capture the essence of film personalities, not just in words but also in images.
Dimple Kapadia and Jackie Shroff were my favourite muses but I also shot Madhuri Dixit, Anil Kapoor, Meenakshi Seshadri, Dilip Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman and Aamir.